Brasstronaut Announce a Canadian Tour With a Crocks Stop

Tofino, Cumberland, Canmore: the first week of the Brasstronaut tour ran through small towns before the cities began. The Vancouver band’s announcement of 2 May 2012 gave seventeen dates in all, starting on 29 May at the Lucky Bar in Victoria and ending on 22 June in Montreal, with Thunder Bay at number twelve.

That is seventeen shows in twenty-five days. When the announcement went up, Thunder Bay was six weeks away and the album two weeks.

The reason for the run was a record. Mean Sun, the band’s second full-length, was due on 15 May on Unfamiliar Records, and the announcement said it had been recorded with the Juno-winning producer Colin Stewart, whose earlier credits included Black Mountain, Dan Mangan and the Cave Singers. A release overseas was planned for the early fall.

The Thunder Bay night

The date was Tuesday 12 June 2012 at Crocks. The routing shows how the tour crossed the middle of the country: Winnipeg’s Park Theatre on the Monday, Thunder Bay on the Tuesday, then LopLop’s in Sault Ste. Marie on the Wednesday. After a day off came Toronto on the Friday, where the band played NXNE.

Thunder Bay was the first Ontario stop, straight after Winnipeg. The tour schedule wrote the room as “Crock’s”. It stood at 16 Cumberland Street South. Ticket prices for the show are not in the announcement. Other Crocks shows that year that carried a price ran from $10 to $25, which gives a rough sense of the room’s scale.

The band and the album

Brasstronaut formed in Vancouver in 2007, and its six members played trumpet, clarinet, piano, guitar, bass and drums. The band’s roots were in pop, rock and jazz, and the horn and clarinet parts set it apart from most guitar bands of its year. Their 2010 debut, Mt. Chimera, was long-listed for that year’s Polaris Music Prize.

Mean Sun followed two years later. Its title borrows the astronomers’ term for an imaginary star that moves at the pace of the equator’s rotation, and Stewart recorded and mixed it in Burnaby. The announcement offered the title track as a first listen, through a download code from the band’s online shop. Tin Angel Records handled the European release in October 2012.

The guests from Iceland

Útidúr, a ten-piece band from Iceland, travelled the country with them. The announcement described their sound as joyous and ambitious chamber-pop with a dramatic streak, and spelled out the pronunciation as “ooh-detour”. Their debut album had been recorded at Sundlaugin, the studio Sigur Rós use, in the summer of 2010.

Exclaim noted that Útidúr would play most of the dates, not all of them, so the Crocks bill may have been Brasstronaut alone. Ten musicians plus six is sixteen people before crew and gear, which is arithmetic and not something anyone reported.

Rooms on either side

The schedule reads like a run of small rooms across the country. In British Columbia the band played the Legion in Tofino, the Waverly in Cumberland and the Habitat in Kelowna. On the prairies came Amigo’s in Saskatoon and the Haven Social Club in Edmonton, after the Gateway in Calgary and a Community Café in Canmore.

East of Thunder Bay the dates were Maverick’s in Ottawa, Le Cercle in Quebec City and Le Divan Orange in Montreal. The schedule left Sunday 10 June free, the day after Saskatoon and before Winnipeg. A free day between those two cities is most likely a driving day, which is a reading of the map and not a reported fact.

A week with heavy company

Three weeks before Brasstronaut, Crocks hosted the metal bill of the Canadian Ritual Tour, with The Black Dahlia Murder on 22 May, a week after Mean Sun reached shops. The room booked a wide spread in a single spring.

Other nights from that year are gathered on the shows page. Brasstronaut released three studio albums and stopped in 2017. The last date of this tour was Montreal on 22 June, at Le Divan Orange, during the Montreal Fringe Festival.